Thanks to my friend Ryan, he turned me on to popurls a few months back and when I need a break I check it out (sadly I don't have a blogging career). In the middle of the day this article called Dwarf's <insert term for male private part> stuck to vacuum cleaner was one of the top Diggs of the day. Basically Captain Dean the Demon Dwarf was supposed to appear in a circus with a vacuum cleaner attached to his member, but he had some problems with glue and the vacuum and had to be taken to a hospital (honest Dr, this was part of my act). BTW - why do these crazy things always happen in England. Anyway the article is funny, but what really makes it are the Google ads found at the bottom of the page. See this screen shot.

Now, you readers know how much I love Google and I am starting to grow to love the reach and targeting abilities in their content networking, but this is too funny. Serving up vacuum cleaner parts ads tied to the content in this article is really funny. On a somewhat serious note, Google actually did a decent job matching 2 out of the 3 ads to the content in the article (guy has problems with his vacuum cleaner breaking down); what I don't understand is how Google decided to map a newspaper print quote ad to the article.

Anyway, funny stuff and if my Google friends keep funniest content matches this has to be near one of the best.

I don't know if you read Wired, but I was quoted pretty heavily in the article called Which Presidents Have Mastered Google? You can read the article yourself, but what I liked about the article was that Sarah used a variety of sources and searches to show who really understands search marketing; unlike the AdAge article that I ripped on a few days ago which didn't reference the following sources. Wired pulled in the iCrossing Study, Apogee Web Consulting's Richard Ball, Peter Greenberger from Google, some searches on her own, and quotes from ME.

I do firmly believe that the real game in Google for politicians is to not only buy versions of the candidate's name but to focus on issue words and content targeting. The only issue with issue targeting (did that on purpose) is that it takes some time to see a return on your investment. And, in order to be more efficient you need to really focus on how Google charges for clicks and hone your marketing strategy. I can't go into details, but believe me we have it down to a science and that's because I've been running search marketing campaigns for a LONNNNGGGGG time.

I think the study itself is very interesting; interesting for a number of reasons.

To me Yahoo has always been a portal, at least since it really ditched its mantra of being yet another hierarchical officious oracle or for you youngsters back when it was just a listing of links.

Google on the other hand has always meant one thing which was search. Even looking at their homepages show the sharp difference between the two. I'm not saying that Google isn't trying to become a portal and your on ramp to the internet, but maybe for the most part it still means just search to people.

Why would someone's satisfaction with Google go down? Are their search results not superior any more? Perhaps their biggest issue is not getting enough traffic on their other product extensions. I haven't seen an update from Hitwise in a while of traffic to other Google properties, but maybe they aren't getting enough downstream. How many people actually have their own iGoogle page? I do and its my home page today.

Meanwhile Yahoo redesigned their website to make it even easier to get more information

From a media buying perspective they are both awesome. The Yahoo Search side can use a little push but I have had and continue to have a lot of great account executives from both of them. I'm not sure who is #1, but through the years I have worked with a lot of great people and even a few of them I'd call friends (Adrienne S, Richard K, Lisa G). One thing that is different between working with them is that:

Google for all of their great account service is really a self-service model with account support. If you know what you are doing you can setup your own account, put in your credit card and off you go.

Yahoo (not search) is largely an account service model where they supply you the rates and placements and then you have to agree to the buy. Other than their search platform it is NOT a self-service model.

Perhaps the media buying examples explains a lot of the customer satisfaction numbers. Google has a lot of great tools for consumers, but unless you know someone or read a blog you may never find out about what they have to offer besides search. Yahoo on the other hand pushes out the content to you, making sure that you are force fed the service. By definition, Yahoo should have better customer satisfaction - do you like table service or buffet service? Anyway, I love them both, but unless you submerge yourself into Google, you are probably missing some great tools.

I had this AdAge article called Candidates Seek Key(words) to Search Success emailed to me by a number of friends and co-workers. However, after reading through the article written by Abbey Klaassen a few times it seems very inconsistent and rushed. Allow me to illustrate what I mean by that:

While the headline under the picture says "Mitt Romney, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have been buying each other's names as online search term" she does the Romney campaign a favor by writing in the article that "Mr. McCain is trying to steal votes even from the other side of the aisle -- he's bidding on "Hillary Clinton". However, this downplays that Romney is also "stealing" votes, but more on the stealing comment and how ludicrous that is in a second

"According to Compete, JohnMcCain.com is benefiting most from competitive search terms, most often at the expense of Mr. Giuliani." Yes, like that is the only reason we are benefiting by using Google. See this Wall Street Journal article as to how we are really benefiting also left out of the AdAge article.

"Mr. Romney has been perhaps the most aggressive search marketer on the
Republican side, and results often turn up not only a paid link to MittRomney.com but also a link to his videos on YouTube, a channel he's used aggressively." Well, a couple of things wrong with that. First, it is widely accepted that Romney is not the most aggressive and if AdAge bothered to research it, they would have found this article via CNN which really doesn't mentioned Romney at all. Second, the YouTube link is not being published by the Romney campaign, but it is being pushed by YouTube itself. I could be wrong on the YouTube but the only way to do it is to click on the Romney ads, but that's unfair. I believe without clicking on the links that she is referencing the YouTube text ads.

I doubt that the Romney campaign is the most aggressive in search marketing; if I had to peg it, I'd say they are third and I spend a lot of my day looking for their ads. However, not even acknowledging the CNN article just makes it look like AdAge rushed their way to the print/online presses. (BTW - I'm referring to search results on Google; I have little to no visibility into Romney's content campaign)

Regarding the stealing votes part of the post, it looks very odd to use that language. What votes is someone stealing right now? Search as defined by Dictionary.com is to look at, read, or examine (a record, writing, collection, repository, etc.) for information. And, if someone is looking for information on a candidate, why wouldn't you try and push your message there? Trying to get someone who is in the act of researching a candidate over to your site can hardly be mis-construed as stealing votes. Stealing traffic and attention, yes, but votes? Come on...

Anyway, enough of my rant. Personally the AdAge article left me with a bad taste in my mouth...

I saw this early this morning when I had trouble sleeping, but then I got distracted with actual work today and couldn't post earlier. It was an announcement from Google's News team called Perspective About The News From People in The News. What that means is that Google is experimenting with allowing people mentioned or interviewed in an article to send a comment in regarding the article, and then Google will display the comments in the search results. Google is "hoping that by adding this feature, we can help enhance the news
experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that -- whether they're penguin
researchers or presidential candidates-- a personal view can sometimes add a
whole new dimension to the story." All comments should be sent into this link where Google will determine authenticity. Interesting, huh?

A few things about this....

Google could now be in the content business. I wrote could because it is unclear as to whether they are going to filter the results in any way. What happens if two people are mentioned in an article; how does Google determine who is first?

So besides entering the content side of the business, is Google "taking" traffic from a person's blog by "hosting" their comments in News. Here's what I mean. I was interviewed by ClickZ for an article on presidential online campaigns and added some personal comments on this blog with this post. Obviously, Google probably (LOL) gets more traffic for that article than I do, so it would be better for me to leave a comment.

In a Twitter word, is it better to leave a comment that appears in your Google News results or write a post that would have less traffic? Don't forget, you probably get significant traffic from search results.

It opens a whole new level of PR responsibilities. Now if you are misquoted or an article shows you in an unfavorable light, you can comment back with a response. If used properly, it can hopefully diffuse (a little) a Macaca moment.

Will Google allow a "conversation" between people in an article?

As I followed the trail of articles today, I stumbled upon a tangential conversation regarding Google walling off access to their news results. Techcrunch noticed it first and then Matt Scoble provided his thoughts. See the thought process? Google does not allow other aggregators to index their news even though now they allow comments which makes the news. While I see the point now with comments and it is a fair one, didn't Google do the job of indexing the news to start? Didn't Google organize it, so we the readers can find it easier? Isn't that getting into the heart of Google's search algorithms. Sure, the new comments content muddies the water, but Google already did its job for organizing it, so why should they let someone else use their indexing to setup their own business?

From a PR perspective, you should be all over this. If an article was written about you and say published on the New York Times you can now influence readers before they actually read the article when they find it on Google. From the macro view of Google taking over our world and organizing it for us, it sure looks like they are well on their plan. It reminds me of comments we used to hear at AT&T from consumers (yes). When the LD world was very competitive, a lot of consumers just wished for the old days when it was regulated and life was much simpler, so they didn't have to worry about switching services. You knew what you were paying, your calls went through, your phone had so many redundancies built in it couldn't fail, ....Pretty soon, all we'll have is one web page to see all of the internet; I wonder if people will think it is simple then?

A bunch of articles and good blog posts came out in the last few days on Google. Here's quick run down on my favorites before I dive head nto this post.

On July 18th (yeah I'm late but I get busy some times), Google announced that they are rolling out Google Print Ads to all advertisers. As written in their press release "...interactively plan a targeted media buy-in up to hundreds of newspapers across
the United States. Once they have identified target newspapers, they enter a bid
for the available ad space and upload a creative."

Let's start with that last bullet about Google's focus on political marketing. As the article points out they are hiring for both helping campaigns and committees to use Google as well as trying to influence Government policy. Both of these require people, especially in DC where face to face meetings are more important than electronically communicating or via phone. The management assigned to each vertical (I've used plenty of Google teams but mostly finance and politics) is focused on educating marketers in each area, especially the ones that are slow to market. These new market entrants require some hand holding and Google is only too happy to help, provided you spend some minimum amount ($9k/mo?). Also, this education is a prime example of why I save some of my own Google tricks for myself and my clients; I'm concerned they may fall into my competitor's laps.

While I'm personally not worried about Google hiring more people, I am worried about Google Print Ads. Sure, the process brought to you by Google is light years ahead of the paper trail, error riddled one used today, but I think print advertising in its current stale, static form is not worth a dime in advertising unless you are a local merchant focused on your territory. A national ad in the WSJ for like a $100K is to me an offensive waste of budget with zero accountability or reliability in generating results. To see how I really feel, visit this link where I was under siege from print agency folks for my attack on Ketel One. Google Print Ads in this current print advertising form is just the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; sure, they'll get a share of the market which they don't currently have and that's good business, but really print advertising is a on the way to irrelevancy.

Having written all of this, I am VERY bullish on Google and can't imagine selling any of my stock for a while; GOOG would have to drop to $400ish before I'd even consider it. You see Google Print Ads, Radio Ads, TV Ads (which I'm sure they are working on), Google AdSense, AdWords, Video and Image Ads, Site Targeting, and etc have one common thing that their competitors don't have; the ability to scale all of these tools up or down to meet any sized advertiser.

The smallest $10 per day search marketer, if they are trained, can use advertising tools usually reserved for the big spenders. With your small amount of daily spend, you get EVERYTHING you need for your campaign, right down to post click tracking of your conversions. You can stream commercials, use targeting techniques to find your sweet spot, hand select websites, and build out your keyword list. Google gives it to you for pennies on the dollar and all you need to do is raise your mouse and search away to educate yourself or find one of their newly hired vertical sales specialists. That's why I'm bullish on Google even when they have a clunker like Google Print Ads.

Thanks to Kate Kaye at ClickZ, she proves once again what you readers already know, John McCain has the best online advertising campaign out of any of the presidential candidates. This is contrary to other poorly informed bloggers who only look at their low traffic websites to draw erroneous conclusions. Kate uses a reputable source like Nielsen Net Ratings to show that the McCain campaign does value a sophisticated web operation. Besides the Nielsen data, I ought to know how we are doing since we run the online and search advertising campaign for them and it HASN'T SLOWED DOWN ONE BIT.

You can dig into the report to see where Nielsen thinks we are running our banner advertising, but what should be clear is that with this report and what CNN reported on the iCrossing search study, we are not only embracing online advertising but doing much better than our competitors. And, if you think the recent changes on the campaign has hurt the results, THAN YOU WOULD BE WRONG. Since the changes from yesterday, our results have skyrocketed and not spun out of control as some in the blogosphere who have ulterior motives would lead you to believe.

From an industry perspective, I wish the other campaigns would jump in a little more instead of relying on the same old advertising techniques or high PR value tools like MySpace or YouTube. Don't get me wrong, I think it is awesome that campaigns are turning to YouTube to have a conversation, but I've yet to see any quantifiable data that they are turning these people into serious campaign supporters (ie - donate time or money).

As you can also see from ClickZ, Romney decided to dip his toe into the online advertising water, while the Clinton campaign stopped running banners ads; in fact, I've yet to see any real paid search activity from her team in a while. The Clinton move is a little perplexing given all of their money. I guess it is possible she is running some, but I spend A LOT OF TIME searching for ads as I run McCain's search campaign and her ads just don't pop up. Yes, that's a little unscientific, so unlike other bloggers, I'm given you a fair warning that I could be wrong, but directionally even if she is running some I still should see some ads given her campaign cash on hand.

Anyway, I really enjoy these studies from Kate/ClickZ as well as other companies like iCrossings because they use scientific methods to actually measure what is happening. It isn't an uninformed opinion from a bunch of political bloggers who want nothing more than to pursue their own agenda.

Sen. John McCain may trail in recentpolls and fundraising totals, but when it comes to paid online visibility, the Arizona senator tops the list of all presidential hopefuls,

The report, titled “How America Searches: Election ‘08″ found McCain’s presidential Web site has the most paid visibility in search results for several common issue-based web queries as of the end of May.

McCain “has clearly embraced paid search as a way to gain exposure for
both his name and his stance on issues,” the report states. Meanwhile
“Edwards appears to be spending a lot of money to achieve some level of
visibility, but not doing so with optimum effectiveness.

"McCain is
taking a very sophisticated approach to Google search engine
marketing," said Michael Bassik, vice president of interactive
marketing at political consulting firm MSHC Partners. At this point,
said Bassik, most candidates "are still really focusing on using search
to solicit e-mail addresses and contributions." Therefore, many care
only about targeting ads to keywords associated with issues that
generate the most action for the least amount of money.

I can't go into details on my search strategy, but if you are one of my clients than you know that you are getting the highest possible expertise in this area and if you are one of my Political clients, than you now have confirmed that we at Connell Donatelli are "The Political Search Gurus" and everyone else is just playing around in this field. A couple of other observations regarding these reports:

Election 2008 will not be about who can get the most friends in MySpace or Facebook or even YouTube views. Election 2008 will be about who can use Google and the other search engines to their fullest potential.

Finally, will people and bloggers STOP TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHO IS BUYING SEARCH WORDS BY SPENDING THREE MINUTES ONLINE SEARCHING? It is a complete waste of time and shows your inexperience. It takes a company like iCrossings to actually do a thorough study.

Anyway, good news on the Fourth of July. At least CNN, WSJ, and ClickZ are starting to notice effective uses of online advertising, especially something that is outside of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube.

Very good article over in today's Wall Street Journal called Long Race Forces Ad Ingenuity. It includes a few quotes from Becki Donatelli on John McCain's search campaign and you can guess who runs it for Becki, ME. Here are some highlights for you:

Republican John McCain's presidential campaign raises about $4 for
every $1 it spends to raise money online, according to Rebecca
Donatelli, a consultant directing the online fund-raising strategy for
the Arizona senator.

Most of the campaigns are now running ads on Google that appear when a
user searches a particular word. Mr. McCain's campaign has been
particularly aggressive on the search site, running text-ads pegged to
some 2,500 words, including Mr. McCain's own name, the word
"president," and the names of his main opponents. "I've become a search
evangelist," says Ms. Donatelli.

Mr. Romney is using Google search ads on a "couple hundred" words,
according to Mindy Finn, director of online strategy for the Romney
campaign. The words used by the campaign change every day based on what
sort of response they see and the number of people who click through to
the Romney Web site, she says. They've used words like "Olympics" (Mr.
Romney is credited with saving the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games);
"health care" (while governor, he pushed through an ambitious
health-insurance plan in Massachusetts); and "cutting spending," to
help drive traffic to the site, she says.

The reason I pulled those quotes was to highlight the differences between McCain's search strategy versus others and to show that we are very focused on raising donations via search. Search as I've written in the past and if you've ever met with me you know, that it should be your lowest cost ROI and politics is no different. It isn't that we don't care about traffic, but compared to other advertisers it is definitely secondary.

The other part of the article that was interesting was the focus on blog advertising instead of display advertising on news sites like Yahoo. I can see the love affair with advertising online versus the cost for similar TV spots, but I don't see why the WSJ didn't make the same comparison for more main stream news sites. Political blogs are awesome and they definitely cater to more politically attuned voters (and perhaps your primary voters), but you can appeal to a wider audience outside of the political blogosphere. Perhaps that's why Google is so successful; we are able to find the non-blog reading individual that is interested in politics at this early stage.

Well, that's about as far as I can go because any deeper I can get into some trouble. I'm happy that the WSJ picked up on our search campaign and spent the time to dig into it a little more than what the typical blog posts write about. So, the next time a blogger comments on McCain search ads running on their site you can now get an insight into why the ads appear there and you should know, that we most likely DID NOT directly target your audience.

A saw this article today over at Time called The Politics of Search and then a blog post by the author Bill Tancer from Hitwise called Election 2008 and I was surprised at the following written conclusion from Bill regarding pay per click advertising:

It appears that at this early stage in the campaign candidates
are relying solely on organic search results — in other words, they
aren't buying any significant search-term advertising to boost their traffic
from search engines. Watching the latest round of political debates, I've
become a little skeptical of both side's commitment to their political
platform. If candidates feel so strongly about the top issues of the day,
then perhaps they should purchase keywords on those issues to stake out
their positions. If a candidate wants to broadcast a position on
abortion, why not purchase the term "abortion," "pro-life" or "pro-choice?"

The bolded statements surprised me a bit because they are really inaccurate and I'm a little surprised that a MSM company like Time didn't fact check it properly. Case in point and NOT using my personal blog posts yet to prove these are inaccurate:

Finally, just checking for yourself in Google will show a candidate bidding on a pro-life word plus other issue words

I think political campaigns are very committed to search marketing. I personally see ALL of the ads multiple times per day. I've written before that PPC advertising is a very dynamic marketplace. There are many reasons why a candidate buys or does not buy words and even when they are buying a certain word, there are valid reasons why their ad may not appear the exact moment when someone decides to write an article. Come on Bill, you just need to spend more time searching for political ads.

I'm really tired of people not fact checking PPC advertising and just making assumptions when they search a few times and don't see anything. Remember even when a campaign is buying a word, they may have hit their daily spend and that's why the ads doesn't show. Simple answer. There were plenty of clues (as shown above) that the 2008 candidates are committed to search advertising; some more than others but enough data is out there.

Did you ever want to know where Google ran your text ads when you opted into Content? Were you unwilling to pay for a bid manager or tracking device that could provide it for you? Well, have no fear search true believers, Google has answered your prayers for more visibility. If you've been reading this blog or have known me for a long time, you know that I urge you to tread carefully when it comes to content.

Quick lesson: when you run a search campaign with Google you have three options; Google only, search results from websites in Google's network, and content targeting where Google serves your ads based on keyword targeting. Oh coincidentally, content is currently the only place within Google where you can run image and video ads. Ok, back to our show.

Back a few years ago, I almost always turned content off. However, these days I'm becoming more at ease with content, especially now with Google's content placement report. As the press release and Inside AdWords blog writes, you can now see where you ads ran (by domain and URL level) as well as impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, and CPA performance metrics. This gives you almost complete visibility into your content media buys. Why is this so important?

It helps with your Whack-A-Mole problem where your ads mysteriously
appear on sites that you don't want. Now you can get ahead of the curve and exclude them using the site exclusion tool.

You can get an idea where Google places your ads based on their targeting engine which can get you more comfortable with running content.

Once you find a website that performs well, you can use Google's site targeting to heavy up on a spend there.

As I wrote above, content is the only place Google lets you run image and video ads so if that is a course you want to pursue, you had best start mastering it.

I've always believed that the majority of click fraud came from content, so now you have better control. The site exclusion tool will become your best friend.

So besides having the report available, I'd like to see Google make improvements to their targeting engine and give you the ability to opt out of sites based on a minimum monthly impression level. Once you run it, you'll see the Long Tail of search marketing at its best and realize that if you only want your brand on a few sites, you'll end up just opting out of 100s of smaller ones. Anyway, I love the fact that Google provides this visibility and once you have it activated you should run the report ASAP. Now, if only Yahoo will figure out this report too, than we might have a better picture of content.

My blog friend Bill Tancer from Hitwise provides a great snapshot of the use of Google products both before and after the new Google Universal Search changes. You can read Bill's post on the big winners and losers, but what I find completely fascinating is the dominance of just a few of Google's products plus how that product usage has a changed over the last year. On May 22, 2006, I wrote the following post called Behind Google's Numbers which talked about Google's product extension and that the top 4 Google products at the time made up almost 97% of its traffic (search: 80%, image: 10%, gmail: 5.5%, news: 1.5%).

Now, a little over a year later according to Bill showed that the top 4 now
composed only 93% of the traffic (search: 69%, YouTube 11.5%, image 7.5%, gmail: 5%) and if you wanted to get to the same 97% level you now need to add it video 1.4%, maps 1.4%, news 1%, blogger 0.5%. The mix is a little different with the YouTube acquisition and even with the new Universal Search process you can see that one of their plans is to spread out a user's product usage. That's your classic bundling strategy.

Now what Google's "competitors" had as an advantage over them was trying to monopolize a user's time by keeping them in their family of websites for as long as possible. Google in the beginning had a simple search page and they tried very hard to avoid making it cluttered with a bunch of links (and still do). So, while Google's product team continues its product line extension it also knows that they need to gather a larger share of a user's internet activity. Google probably thinks that while having a ton of search activity does wonderful things for your income statement in the short term, they need to continue to be relevant in the long term by increasing usage beyond search.

The new Universal Search strategy goes a long way to putting more Google products right at your fingertips. Now, relevant results whether it is news, video, books, etc can be found in the search results and if you want to drill down in a certain area (ex - blogs) you can hit a link at the top of the results. Besides improving search, it has the added benefit of putting more of Google's products easily within reach.

Take this search results link on John McCain over at Yahoo. Do you see the Yahoo Answers Senator McCain had a few months back? No. No link at the top or within the search results. Not even by the Also Try link. Yahoo could also cross sell you (delicately) into the special elections page they set up for all of the 2008 candidates, but they don't. Is this altering your results? Yes, but as I pointed out above, they already have a spot for Also Try so what's the harm?

How about over at MSN? Well, let's just say they have a lot of work to do starting with traffic.

This just illustrates again that Google continues to outmaneuver their competitors. It reminds me of a quote from my friend Jim W when we were in college at Rutgers. Back then the Men's basketball team had two transfers named Duncan and Hughes and when I asked Jim what they were like in practice, Jim replied "Men, playing with boys Eric. Just like men playing basketball against boys."

Well Google announced that they are rolling out Google Audio to advertisers this month and a few of my Google accounts had it turned on. When I played around with the interface, I almost ran a campaign for my own personal Google account but then I realized it might cost me a few $100 dollars for a test. Here's what I liked about what I saw:

Auction style radio advertising

Ability to have Google help me with actually making the script

Of course if I send it into a special webpage I'll be able to measure the traffic increase

Ability to select which markets you want your ads to run in and/or which radio genres to have you ads played on

Unlike print advertising which I think is an absolute waste of marketing dollars unless you are advertising at the local level, I think radio has a little bit of branding opportunity because the audience especially drive time is a captive one. The trick as anything with advertising is to make sure you can measure your ROI, but if Google can make it easier for the small marketer to enter into the radio market, than more power to them. Also, know what you are getting which is an auction based simpler process to getting into radio - you are not getting the measurement and results that you've come to expect from AdWords.

Well, that's why I'm bullish on Google Audio and you should be too if you ever wanted to test out Radio advertising. The only other warning I could give you is to make sure you don't step too hard on your offline advertising co-woker's or agency's toes. Using Google Audio to replace them may be hazardous to your career opportunities :-)

I saw this report from comScore a few days ago which was their April U.S. Search Engine Rankings and of course it showed Google at almost 50% and growing followed by Yahoo at 26.8% (a decrease) and then MSN at 10.3% (also a decrease) followed by Ask.com at 5.1% ( a slight decrease) and AOL holding flat at 5.0%. This got me thinking. Hmmm, when faced with a huge juggernaut like a Google or back in my old telecom days like an AT&T or my brokerage days like a Schwab what did those competitors do? Answer: They bought or combined with the companies above them.

Back in the beginning, I dealt with a company called GoTo.com for search. GoTo was really the only place to do pay per click ads and as I recall DLJ was one of their underwriters. Anyway, I met with their executives including Jaynie Studenmund and cut a deal for CSFBdirect to run pay per click advertising through their networks. A few months later the company was renamed Overture. Besides having some search traffic on Overture (they never really pushed it), they offered PPC advertising on sites like Yahoo, MSN, and as I recall AOL too. My search campaigns with Overture predated Google, but when Google really started pushing search marketing, I jumped on board. However, back in the day, Overture always outperformed Google from an account perspective as well as a CPA perspective. That lasted until about the middle 2004 when Google's results started to surpass Overture.

That's of course about a year and a half after Yahoo acquired them. Yahoo was their biggest customer so that acquisition made sense. MSN wasn't too happy but stayed with them for a while until they broke off their deal. AOL left a few years earlier, so all that was left was Overture search partners and Yahoo. Part of my Managing Director group at Harrisdirect was running search and what we noticed was a lack of ownership by the former Overture team and a lack of new innovations.

Now a year after that and what do you have? Search traffic that is heading down hill still
while Google grows. The campaigns that I run now for a lot of different clients including myself (political and non-political so the folks the follow me should know that this is for varying search campaigns and NOT John McCain's search campaign) usually show the same results:

Google kicks butt from a volume as well as a CPA perspective

MSN has little volume, but outstanding CPA and ROI

Yahoo is sandwiched in between, half the volume of Google and the highest CPAs and the worst ROIs of the three but for the most part in acceptable ranges.

That's why I think that for MSN and Yahoo to compete they ought to combine the search platforms again. I know it seems like that is going back to the future, but they worked together well in the past and how does that saying go "My enemies enemy is my friend." MSN can provide the editorial review and targeting know how and Yahoo can provide the community search via Yahoo Answers which seems to be a Google issue for now. Their traffic combinations and tools that they can bring each other might make this more of a competition.

In a day with TiVo, RSS feeds, YouTube, social networking, the demand for a user's attention is turning into quite a battle. Plus broadband and a browser's tabbing function makes it much easier to move around from site to site so trying to get a monopoly of a user's surfing is very difficult. If you give them a reason to use you over and over again they'll keep coming back like the model that Google has. MSN and Yahoo search can't stand on their own and compete with Google, but together they can make Overtures to first place again.

A few days ago Google provided a new service that lets you track the hottest trends in Google searches. Being curious about what the world was searching about, I of course bookmarked the trends link. When I just hit it a few minutes ago, I was surprised to see my former Union High School classmate Artie Lange was ranked as high as 5 for hottest searches on Google. Wow, that's amazing. According to the tabs in Google, Artie is leaving the Howard Stern show which is obviously what vaulted him into the top 5 hottest searches on Google. I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M WRITING THIS AGAIN - A FORMER UNION HIGH SCHOOL ALUMNI IS IN THE TOP 5 HOTTEST SEARCHES ON GOOGLE.

Anyway, a lot of people ask me what he was like in high school and I tell them the same thing. He was a good athlete especially for baseball, he was skinny, of course very funny, and he was always pretty nice to me. That's saying a lot because I was pretty nerdy back then, but Artie was a heck of a guy to me in Union. My two biggest memories of Artie are watching him play 3rd base especially during practice (I ran track) and the story of how he slipped a mock stick up note to a bank teller on the corner of Morris Avenue and Colonial Avenue; it was of course a fake, with a note on the back saying "only kidding", but Artie got in trouble none the less. I couldn't find his signature in my yearbook and as I recall he didn't graduate with the rest of us in 1985.

Anyway, congrats Artie on making Google's 5 hottest search trends for today. I hope you dry out, but WTF you are rich and famous right?

I finally saw this post over at Search Engine Roundtable called Google to Shut Down AdSense Arbitrageurs and I rejoiced. I really did. I can't stand these useless sites which do nothing but direct legitimate searches queries into landing pages with complete garbage on it or worst yet, more useless links. I wrote back over a year ago how I Really Hate These Sites so I'm thrilled that Google realized that these sites were hurting its brand and making it more difficult to rule search marketing.

How do these sites make money? Simply put, they buy pay per click ads at $X and
then monetize the traffic, hoping to make money that is >$X. If you really want to dive into how the sites actually monetize the traffic and why it is getting impossible to buy decent .com sits read this article called The Man That Owns The Internet. Don't have time to read the whole article? Than study this graphic from it because it shows you how to make money off these parasitic sites.

Do I think by Google shutting down their AdSense ability will do much? Probably not unless Yahoo follows along with them. Now, these parasites can purchase ads with Google AdWords and then sell ads from Yahoo's content network. Or, they'll just figure out some other way to generate money off these helpless clicks to these sites.

For now, Google goes a little further in protecting its brand and making it a little more difficult for these companies to make a quick buck. Thanks.

I read this article called Google Sweet Talks Its Way to Political Power from ZDNet's Donna Bogatin and it really fired me up. Usually I enjoy reading Donna's posts because it gives a different perspective on what Google is up to, but not this time. This time I'm upset because of the implications from her article. In summary, she basically writes that Google's interest in sponsoring Personal Democracy Forum's recent conference was purely political in nature in the hopes of locking up favorable situations for its company come 2008. While I'm sure anyone that deals in the political space is hoping for favorable outcomes, as a veteran online media buyer, it was pretty much business as usual for business development opportunities.

Before I continue to shred the article, let me give you a little background on myself (if you already know feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph). I've been buying versions of search advertising since the very beginning of my online marketing programs going back to AT&T circa 1998. Back then, one of the only sections of our media buys with publishers like Yahoo, iVillage, Lycos, and Excite that worked was search marketing. When I moved to what was then known as DLJdirect, I used that experience to optimize our poorly performing AOL buy, sign a PPC deal with what was then known as GoTo.com (aka Overture aka Yahoo), and the day Google turned on their PPC product, a woman named Jackie P. in my grouped called them up to start a deal. There are also quite a number of case studies of my search campaigns including this one from Google and this one on the impact of search on display ads with Yahoo.

Fast forward to today and I'm a Chief Internet Strategist for Connell Donatelli where I design media strategies and implement media plans for political campaigns including John McCain for President. Of course search marketing is an important component in all of our media plans and Google is the first stop for any of our plans. And, that's what gets me about Donna's post. It isn't that Google is spending money on parties or conference sponsorships that causes campaigns to use it. Do you think Barack Obama's campaign spent $72,000 in the first quarter on Google because it throws a good party (see screen shot in post continuation)?

No, political campaigns just like all other intelligent marketers spend money on Google because it performs. You control what you spend and you can track the results. Unlike crappynewspaper ads, I know where my money is going and what it does when someone clicks on it. Party or no party, sponsorship or no sponsorship, Google dominates because of a great product and strategy and superior, manageable results. If it didn't political campaigns just like all other online marketers would just move on.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

****Update on 5-22****

Donna Bogatin published our Google statistics for John McCain proving what I wrote above, that it is not about Google buying power, but it is about results. To see the results clipped from the post , not from the actual presentation which I have, see the post continuation.

There are so many posts out there right now on the new changes that Google made to their search results and what their plans are for the future, that it will be hard to keep this short, but I'll do my best to summarize. If you want to dive in further, make sure you hit the links that I'm putting in this post. Before I give you a quick opinion of what this means to you as a marketer, here's a quick list of all the posts out there:

Marissa Mayer's Post on Universal Search: Key take aways for me are that: Google is
"searching" through all of its other search platforms (books, blogs, videos) and organizing them into the organic results. Also the top of search results will include links to allow you to drill down in a particular area like blogs, music, etc. See this screen shot.

Google Product Managers on Behind The Scenes of Universal Search: Examples of what went into the process of reorganizing the search results. What I liked best was how Google will estimate that if you are search for a recipe for example, they will direct you to a page in a book instead of having you grind through results.

CNET has a great wrap up called Google creates uber search site: From CNET: "More significantly, the Google home page eventually will have ads
featuring more than just text: some will include video and display,
Mayer said in remarks to reporters afterward. "That door has always
been open," she said. "We don't have a particular timeline in place." Also, Google admits that not everyone is using their other products as I wrote about quite a long time ago but this change now wraps in those products.

An unbelievably useful summation of all of Google's changes
from super search expert Danny Sullivan called Google Searchology Day. So much good information in there, but the ones you should check out if you don't have time to read are: Google's experimental search lab and of course the new timeline search (see screen shot of John McCain's timeline.

That's a ton of articles to go through, but this is a major deal for Google.
OK, so what does this mean for you wanna be search marketers?

1) I think it puts even more pressure on having a PPC advertising program with Google. You are no longer guaranteed to have your official site as the #1 result. In fact with universal search, news results that were up above the results in a box will get aggregated into the official natural search results. See this example:

In this screen shot of George Bush's results, the official page is #2, news is #3 and wikipedia is #1. The other thing you should notice is how long the page is and that only a few results actually make it above the fold. In an unscientific test, I'm seeing an average of 4-5 natural results above the fold. With these changes, your PPC becomes even more important because you can try and game it to be above the fold.

2) Wikipedia looks like it is becoming more and more important in the search results especially for famous people. Heck, it was even listed as #7 on this search of AT&T. Make sure your PR department keeps your entry up to date.

3) Since news, blogs, videos, books, and etc are more tightly integrated into the results you should also keep an eye on what's being said in the blogosphere on your product. Stories that were once buried in another search grouping can now appear at the top of your results. My friend Dan Lynn has a great blog monitoring product called relevantNoise.

4) I'm wondering how much this will increase Google's lead in the search results universe. One of its problems over the years was that you could have gamed them by building a micro search company that focused on a particular area. Also, as Google continues to improve their core product line, I wonder how much more pressure will be put on MSN and Yahoo to get together more to take them on. I'm finding it more difficult to use anyone else but Google these days.

Well that's it. Sorry about the long post, but I hope you found it informative.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article called You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well that published on May 8th. It provides a lot of good information on why your name can impact your career as well as dating (my words) and how some parents will go to lengths to make their child's name search friendly. Now, I have to be honest, I didn't Google my child's names before we gave them one, but in the scheme of how people go through the naming process it probably is a good checkoff to look at.

Personally (and my former Harrisdirect colleagues will attest to it) I've always been cognizant of what my Google results looked like. It used to be that I always made sure my resume changed from year to year, but now I need to make sure my Google results are in great shape. The reason I always kept a focus on my search results? Simple. For perspective employers and this was before it became vogue. There were several successful interviews that I've had in the past when I told the interviewee to just Google me to see what I've been up to. Also, as of late it has been very helpful in gaining new business leads as well as meeting with people who I haven't spoken to in a while.

About a year back I helped a person with starting their new blog. I tried to dig through my emails to come up with their blog and/or name but I switched PCs and couldn't find it. He was an old agency executive and claims he made up the term G-Cred. G-cred was short for Google Credibility and looked out how your search results boosted your image or didn't. He quizzed me when he first mentioned it proudly and as I recall I thought I answered it as having something to with Google. Anyway, he was quite proud of the term G-Cred especially because he believed he coined the phrase. So what's my secret tips for boosting your own G-Cred?

Start early and focus on your results now; don't wait so that the 2 reviews you've done on Amazon end up being your #1 search results.

If you work for a major corporation, try and get your name published in any corporate newsletters. For a while one of my top results was an in-house interview I did for an article on AT&T's Personal Network.

Focus on official public relations releases. See if your own internet PR department can put you in any releases. Anything you can get from your own releases will be gravy. However, I got more play out of partners, especially web publishers that wanted to put out case studies or press releases on projects. #3 on my own results is a case study I did with Google while at Harrisdirect.

Get your own URL and make sure it is a good one. I have www.ericfrenchman.com as well as pardonmyfrench.typepad.com and www.pardonmyfrench.net. So when people Google me those websites show up at the top of the search results.

Blog because Google loves indexing blogs and you get to control your own spin so people can see how you think. If you don't have the time to blog, try and visit your favorite blogs and leave comments. If the blog is popular enough, your comment will get indexed too.

There you go. My top 5 tips for upping your own G-Cred. It is very important now to make sure that your results reflect how you want to be seen by the community. Otherwise, you'll lose control of your own spin and perhaps your credibility in front of people you care about.

I've been advertising with Google since way in the beginning of their PPC platform and continue to run very large search marketing campaigns. I've also run huge (north of $130 million in online advertising) display/banner advertising campaigns since 1997 and always have used an ad server for placing my ads, tracking results, measuring post-click conversions, and etc since 1997. I've tried them all - MatchLogic, BlueStreak, Atlas, and of course DoubleClick.

So, unlike other blogs that claim to have experience (especially in the political marketing blogosphere), I actually have a ton and continue to work in this space. One of things that's always been tough is having a single source for reporting, optimization, trafficking, planning, and counting conversions (more on that in a second) and now with a stroke of a pen and $3.1 Billion in cash (yes cash or as Henry Blodget wrote: a few quarters of free cash flow) Google solves advertisers problems by acquiring DoubleClick.

Now why does this solve a lot of problems? Simple. Let's take a look at how this helps advertisers and agencies:

I've never been a fan of DoubleClick's customer service, although to be perfectly fair, I haven't experienced it in the past 5 years, but combined with Google I may give them another shot

Counting conversions becomes a lot easier now that I can use one source for tracking display ads and search ads. Sure, you could have used a combined platform in the past, but that needed long redirects and a PHD in setting up tracking tables; and it gets more complicated with rich media executions

Double counting of latency conversions should now be a thing of the past because theoretically, GoogClick will have a complete picture of the post-click tracking

Hopefully, the reporting platforms will become easier to use like Google's today

One name to present to clients and upper management for reporting and tracking - Google

Finally, it should be easier for optimization because both the advertiser and Google will have a complete picture of the media buy and the relationship between display and search advertising

For Google, the advantages are huge starting with the fact that they used cash and kept DoubleClick out of Yahoo's and Microsoft's hands. They can combine search, display, blogs, email and site targeting into one neat package; plus, retargeting efforts become that much more ubiquitous. I never bought off on Google's complete search tracking package, but now I might. Finally, imagine all of that data they now get to go through and analyze; it can only improve their targeting capabilities which is currently top notch, but could use a boost (just check out some of the ads on my blog to see what I mean by targeting mistakes).

Finally, where does it leave Microsoft and Yahoo? Yahoo, probably not that much worse off because I know they have powerful targeting tools already and analyze the data on the family of websites. Microsoft? I think they are fighting against a strong current and looks like every stroke they try to take in the online river, they just end up going back towards that waterfall. Nice move Google.

Introduce(d) the first automated system for buying,
selling, delivering and measuring television ads on EchoStar DISH
Network's 125 national satellite programming networks.

EchoStar and Google are working together to provide
automated online campaign planning, scheduling, delivery and
measurement of ads on the DISH Network.

"We (Google) think we can add value to this important medium by
delivering more relevant ads to viewers, providing better
accountability for advertisers and better monetize inventory for TV
operators and programmers."

Each day, Google will analyze anonymous data culled from the set-top
boxes of the Dish network subscribers and only bill advertisers for the
segment of the audience that watched a commercial a designated amount
of time

Because of strict privacy laws governing cable and satellite TV, Google
isn't trying to divine the interests of individual viewers or
households, although company officials have said they eventually hope
to win permission to do something along those lines some day.

Now why am I a little more bullish on this effort as opposed to radio or print? Simple, if Google can work with EchoStar to figure out if someone actually watched an ad for a period of time, that's HUGE news. This allows the advertiser to know if people are actually watching the ads and then they can optimize accordingly assuming that the results are published in a reasonable amount of time. Note, I didn't say real-time because based on the tidbits above it looks like it would be delayed 24 hours. Plus, the other upside is the auction based style on buying and selling ads on a CPM basis and only billing advertisers for what has been viewed. This makes me bullish.

Now, on the other side, I agree part of the way with Donna Bogatin that they haven't been able to extend the platform into the offline world, won't have complete control over the platform, and Google will be acting as a middle man all under the guise of making the process more efficient.

Plus, the biggest negative is that they still have a ways to go specifically on results tracking. While it is great to know if someone watched an ad (impression) and then optimize accordingly, I really want to know as a big advertiser whether someone actually responded to the ad (click) and if they took an action based on the ad (conversion). Only then, will I really be able to judge the effectiveness of my ads. Wouldn't it great to actually optimize offline ads appropriately and figure on a CPC or CPA?

While this is a better model than radio or print, it still has a long way to go to even approach online's optimization and results tracking abilities. Up until now, they've had mixed and in my opinion sub-par results extending the buying model to radio and print. For example, I wonder when Google will finally power XM Radio's ads in a more targeted fashion? Until they can crack that results and targeting code, Google TV will be a nascent step towards improving the offline advertising process and that's why I'm slightly more bullish on it.

I'm sorry I'm a little behind on my posts, but I do have to work sometime. Anyway, I got quite a number of emails from friends and co-workers on what I thought of Google testing a cost per action deal structure. Funny thing is that I caught wind of it a while back and wrote a post called Google Testing CPA Network - Yahoo? Anyway, here are my thoughts on CPA and while I'm not as cynical as that original post, I'm not that far off from where I was back in June of last year.

Read the fine print, this is for Google's content targeting network, not for Google search results or search results on partner sites. If you are like most advertisers, Google's content network is either turned off or a small percentage of your spend.

A CPA deal will go a long way to solving a click fraud problem, but I didn't read anything in their details about visibility as to which publishers will be running the CPA ads. That's always been my biggest issue with content and until they tell you where the ads are running, that lack of visibility is still a problem.

You'll need to implement Google's conversion tracking codes which of course work really well, maybe too well. As outlined in their own help on conversion codes, Google places a 30 day cookie on the user's PC which will be used to connect a conversion with a click. This 30 day window opens up a large latency and double counting issue with your other ad buys (yes, I just linked to a post from 2005).

The double counting becomes an issue because Google won't have any visibility (unless you let them) into your other ad buys and could potentially count a conversion that you've allocated elsewhere.

I usually solve that problem by insisting on using a 3rd party for tracking, but didn't find any options for that path other than turning all tracking over to Google.

Finally, I found no mention of impression based conversion tracking versus click based. Again, Google's PPC works well because it starts with a click, but how will they count a conversion that's generated from a view through impression and should you be paying Google for that? What happens if you are also running ads via a different network or are already on that site due to your own wheeling and dealing?

I tried looking around for clarification on the above, but couldn't locate it based on my usual blog readings. So in the end, would I test CPA? Yes, but only for clients that have shown successful content campaigns already. Do I think this is some change the game or advertising altering panacea that delivers great value for advertisers while rescuing Google from click fraud issues? No.

I've run a TON of CPA deals over the years totaling in the multi-million dollars. What I've found is when publishers are desperate for ad dollars, an advertiser can make a killing, but otherwise a CPA deal is just one of many options available to you. Sometimes it is better for you, sometimes it is better for the publisher, and sometimes nobody wins and you get outbid for the inventory; heck, there is always the possibility you don't convert enough and the publisher drops you altogether. However, if you aren't already translating your CPM or CPC deals into a CPA than you really don't understand performance marketing and a straight CPA deal won't be able to cover up your marketing short comings.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

*****By the way, my friend Kevin Lee from Did-it wrote a post for ClickZ which mirrors my post almost to the letter. Good to know great minds think a like.

As I was checking through all the major campaign's search campaigns, I started to notice that a YouTube ad was appearing on all the candidate's names and I thought hmmm that is interesting. I only browsed through the top candidates of each side and as long as they are featured on YouTube's You Choose '08 page, there is a corresponding Google text ad directing the clicks into the individual candidate's YouTube video page. Some screen shots are shown in this post, but here are a couple of interesting observations:

Mitt Romney's own text ad was consistently listed
in the third spot behind declare yourself and YouTube. BTW - I'm not commenting on their search strategy, they may have valid reasons for not being #1.

Hillary and Edwards who don't have any PPC ads of their own, now have YouTube in their #1 slot.

Any other campaigns that are running PPC ads now have YouTube solidly in their #2 slot.

Of course, their ad buying raises a couple of questions, namely:

How much does this effect the actual CPCs people are paying and is that fair?

What is the impact on their search marketplace?

Why is Google actually paying (assuming they are paying) to drive traffic into YouTube? I thought they wouldn't need to do that. And, even if they're not paying, there is an opportunity cost to not having someone in that second position.

Are the ads actually driving bid amounts up for advertisers on those words? What happens if someone wants to outbid YouTube for the placement.?

I wrestled with what I actually think about it and I guess I'm coming up in a neutral to positive position. If you are not running any PPC ads (not sure where the logic is for that
move.....), but you care enough about YouTube, than Google is doing you a big favor. If you are running PPC ads, I also think it could be helping you by keeping someone else out of the #2 position and sending people into a page that hopefully you've been working on. The most negative aspect of it could mean your CPCs are going up or you are dropping in the rankings for your own name.

You thought search engine marketing was complicated in the private sector? Try outbidding Google for your own brand name....

Hey, it has been a while since I did a marketing rapid fire, mostly because I use the tag posts for you readers. Anyway, a couple of random observations from the last day or two...

On a subway train today I saw an ad for MSN Direct's coffee maker
which I found surprising. Not that I thought they shouldn't advertise, but that it was on a subway train which is pretty much not targeted. Plus, I found it interesting that the product does NOT connect to the internet for data but to FM. Interesting that MSN's brand to me stands for computers and connecting to the internet and this product doesn't do that. Heck, I might have bought it if it connected to my home network. How hard could that be for Microsoft?

Speaking of Microsoft, I've had a lot of problems with their search platform lately. Not the results reporting but what seems to be an over zealous editorial team rejecting words left and right. And, to top it off a new mantra to differentiate their marketing campaigns from Yahoo and Google. Not sure what they mean, but with their low search volume, I think they should be more forgiving to marketers hanging in there with them.

Speaking of search there were two small, but very good articles today in The Wall Street Journal. First, Yahoo Ad-Ranking Tools Clicks With Online Users which shows the success that Yahoo is having with their new search algorithm for displaying ads. Basically, there new model positions ads based on cost, click rate, and relevancy (and others) and this is generating more clicks for them. And, in a related article a Federal judge ruled that Search Engines Can Legally Decline Ads which allows them to continue this practice.

Staying in the search mode, quite a few search queries have ended up at my website from the search terms "Springsteen social security number". 1) This is scary that people are trying to do that 2) Shows how natural search isn't always reliable because that is just a concatenation of two mutually exclusive posts. I of course have no access to that type of data.

Finally, people still consistently search on my website for results on the crappy Lowermybills.com ads which no matter how they dress them up with presidents, people shaving copy into their hair, are just plain the worst banner ads I've ever seen. And, judging by the traffic, you readers agree too.

John McCain was featured on Yahoo! Answers today asking What
would you do to stop wasteful government spending? and as of this posting
had over 11,000 answers. There are a lot of good answers from Yahoo's
community in addition to quite a number of funny ones. I personally think
this is a great way to involve people and also drive traffic for Yahoo.
Who would you rather have ask you a question?

Thousands of answers become a nightmare to go through and I know that any
campaign featured there will go through them. Besides the ability to give
responses, people in the community can vote an answer up or down and if enough
negative votes occur, the answer gets hidden. This keeps the amount of
rude comments down and truly focuses Yahoo Answers on people that take it
seriously and actually want to give constructive feedback. This is in
direct competition with blogs and message boards where any bad comment can live
forever unless the blogger removes it.

I wrote about Yahoo Answers a long time back with how much I
like it. I’ve participated fairly often
in the early days, but now I get a little too busy to weed through the
comments. It is a great way to leverage
Yahoo’s reach into the internet community while empowering it. I just hope people don’t make a game of
comparing the number of answers candidates receive because each topic is unique
and that’s not the point of the exercise. I hope Yahoo keeps these coming because it is a great way to get people
to share their opinions and get involved in the political process.

I saw quite a number of blogs post their observations of the PPC campaigns for all the major 2008 political campaigns. The posts usually go like this: democrats are pretty much ignoring search advertising while republicans are very aggressive, but still not a lot of activity on issues words. I guess this is where I'm going to jump in with a quick lesson on PPC advertising because these experts seems to be missing a few of them and don't grasp how it even works. So, get your paper and pencil out, because here's how you get placed in the sponsored listings...

Maximum bid amount - besides working into your listing, this is a main driver of whether you can EVEN afford to buy the word given your objectives. In my own personal account, the KW online marketing costs me $3 per click and on a $7 daily budget, that doesn't leave much room....

Relevancy - sure I can buy the KW french, but if I don't have content to back it up, my listing will suffer and it may increase my minimum bid amount

Creative click rate - 'Nuff said

Competitiveness of keywords - obviously the more competition, the more likely the cost will rise; especially if everyone wants to be #1 and has unlimited budgets (try buying the KW online stock trading)

Search engine secret sauce

Daily budget cap - the closer you get to your daily budget, the less likely you are of being shown.

All of these factors go into how much an advertiser has to pay for an individual keyword and whether their ad shows up for a particular keyword. So, if you look for a specific word or two or three and wonder, gee why don't they buy this word, maybe it has to do with the sophisticated pay per click bidding strategy or just a simple budget cap. Perhaps they are, gosh is this possible, being bought somewhere else other than Google.

Plus, if you track post-click activity, then you can really prove out whether high cost per click words actually translate into back-end sales. The better search campaigns out there know this and that's why they do more than buy the branded names of their products or clients. However, if you must look, try typing in at least 100 different words in all three majors at different times of the day to see if the words are being bought before posting your myopic view of the PPC search world.

When I talk about search marketing with clients and friends, they are often amazed when I tell them that the #1 searched term is ebay. Surprise, I am wrong (it happens rarely). It was myspace according to this Hitwise report from LeeAnn Prescott called 2006 Top Search Terms. And, #2 was myspace.com followed by my ebay example. What gets me is why, why do people type in myspace.com into a search box. Seriously what possesses you to do this? (leave an anonymous comment)

If you have ever typed in ebay.com into Google or better yet Yahoo.com into a Yahoo search box, then disconnect your mouse and hit yourself over the head 5 times and after each clunk on your noggin scream, NO. Thanks for the good data LeeAnn - you have no idea how much you've helped me today.

I've seen quite a number of posts out in the political blogosphere that make me laugh at the naivety of these wanna be search marketers. Look, you can't measure how large a search campaign is by looking at 5 words - say the political rivals on the Democrat party. That means nothing to measuring the breadth of the ad buy. Sure it shows that the campaign has reach at least Stage 1 in actually having a search campaign, but it means NOTHING when it comes to size, budget or sophistication.

If you haven't already figured it out - the major search engines place ads based on maximum bid amount, click rates, relevancy, daily budget, as well as some secret sauce ingredient that differentiates them. By searching on 5 words that you think someone should be buying and then drawing conclusions based on it, truly shows a lack of understanding of basic search engine marketing. How many search engines are they buying on? How many words are being bought? What's the daily spend? What are the goals - branding, email signups, video playback, donations?

All these things go into any well managed campaign that can't be figured out by typing Hillary Clinton into a search field, which by the way shows up no results and hasn't for as long as I've been watching it. The lack of ads means that a) they hit their daily budget or b) they have no campaign.

Also, as a point of reference, this Rimm-Kaufman Group Political Search Study is not the bible for search advertising in 2006. As you can read from the comments on the post I made analyzing the report, Alan Rimm-Kaufman agreed with my assessment that it wasn't a complete picture of the search field in 2006. "We focused on close Senate races, intentionally. The study clearly did not address the entire election 06 experience.Our conclusions apply to that scope: on key Senate races, we didn't
find much advertising on candidate's names (only an average of 3 or 4
ads per Google SERP), not much on
other phrases ("war in iraq"), and
pretty much zip on Yahoo.

As I wrote back in another post called Major Politicians Are in Google, You Just Need to Search, you really need to have a more thorough analysis than just a few keywords. Or at least, try spending about a month actually buying some of these words yourself before posting your lack of understanding for the world to see....WOOF

Well, well, well - what should be viewed as a victory for people that like their search as realistic as possible, Google finally decided to do something with Google bombs. As I've written before, I firmly believed that these results were/are not cute little pranks played by people, but well thought out and planned attacks to have results altered by a few zealots. The biggest examples of course are political in nature and what I found distasteful about them is that a group of people forced their political viewpoints on searchers worldwide for their own purposes. I sincerely hope that Google continues to protect our search results and therefore their own brand as I've written about in the past.

According to Matt Cutts, (especially in Matt's comments from his personal blog), these are algorithmic changes to their search results and are not manually filtered. However, what continues to baffle me is how Google still thinks these are just pranks. I can assure you they are not and hopefully Matt will take a look at the latest example that I've provided him which proves these are not pranks.

....This Google Bombing was done by at most a few hundred links pointing at the
biography, if that many. Google annoyingly makes it impossible to tell exactly
how many links are involved using the term, but to say that this particular
campaign is the same as the "opinion on the web" is absurd. So only a few
hundred people are able to speak for millions of web users? This isn't the
web's opinion -- it's a particular opinion on the web.

Users are also hurt, because there are indeed "legitimate" sites for this
query that get knocked down in the results.

However, to be fair to Danny, I don't know whether he considers these political bombs pranks or not. I've read the post over multiple times and I still can't determine what his view is other than what he wrote above. These are not political games, pranks, jokes or anything of the sort; these are people purposely altering your results for their own political agenda.

With more and more people getting their news and information from the internet it is critical that the leading information provider keeps their results as pure as possible. And, with the hundreds of millions of dollars that will cost the candidates running in 2008, this is not some cute little industry befuddled by a bunch of jokers. However, I'm glad Google finally made changes; just not so sure why they still consider it just a bunch of political pranks....

Wow. Google has increased the amount of vendors enrolled in Google base according to the article posted at Media Post called Google Base Traffic Soars with $10 Promotion. Far be it for me to complain about the $10 promotion because I've done a lot more than that when trying to sell a product or two ($100 cash for a new brokerage account), but me thinks the big driver of the signups was the listing on Google.com. How much traffic could be driven there in a day when you out a link on there? I wonder if Google decided to promote more products, would they actually get more visits to say a dog like Google Finance? Right now Google.com has to be their biggest funnel of traffic to individual products when they choose to use it. I wonder how long it will take before they start rotating in products on the home page more often than they do now which is on a rare occasion.

This week's BusinessWeek has an article called The Small Fry Sour on Search Ads and it reminded me of two posts I made a while back called What's Your Blogging Storey and What Came First The Chicken or The Blog. The article basically describes how smaller search marketing advertisers are getting squeezed out of PPC advertising by the bigger and much deeper pocketed national advertisers. Of course the Googles and the Yahoos of the world really are not in a position to do anything because if cost per clicks rise and big advertisers are the reason than they make more money. My personal guess is that this is only just beginning and will only continue to get worse when Madison Avenue starts recommending more and more spending on search marketing. So, what's a Mom-Pop advertiser supposed to do:

Don't just rely on Google for search marketing - very often for my clients I find that Yahoo and MSN have MUCH lower CPC rates than Google. I also find that click rates are also much higher on them too. Sure the traffic on Yahoo is half of Google and MSN is probably a tenth, but you just might be able to make up the impression loss with more traffic at a cheaper rate.

Focus on the Long Tail and try 3 and 4 word search terms if you haven't already done so.

Try starting your own blog as I mentioned in the posts above. You might never be able to compete with the big advertisers, so try building your own community with your own content to generate traffic. Then turn around and monetize it by selling or linking to your own products.

Get involved in social marketing either by loading up your own home made commercials (assuming they are entertaining) or joining communities that are already in your products.

How about a wiki on your product? I'm sure people would find it interesting to share uses and other ideas.

Yes it is going to get harder and harder to rely on search PPC ads to drive traffic to your website. So, try building up your content which will cost you nothing more than time.

This was the first trip with my new HP laptop and it was AWESOME. The laptop is fully loaded and the only thing that I didn't max out was the hard drive because I have an external hard drive at home for all of my Springsteen bootlegs that I've ripped over the years. No this IS NOT a PAID POST by HP, but if they'd like to throw a few gifts my way, I'll happily take them! The laptop is like typing on glass, has a built in web cam, the screen is beautiful, has plenty of ports and a great on/off switch for wireless. Seriously, it is great and instead of paying for memory hogging Norton or McAfee I went with BitDefender for my virus and firewall protection. I also finally upgraded to Office 2003 and I L-O-V-E it. Couple the new laptop with my Treo 700W and I have wireless access where ever I am including the northbound train from DC to NJ.

One thing that will be suffering from lack of use will now be all of those nifty products that Google has put out on the internet. You know the so called Microsoft Office killers spreadsheets, calendar etc. Back when Mary and I shared a Dell Laptop and I had an old HP desktop I came to rely on these services for my calendar, storage, and even email. Now. No more. Dropped like a hot potato. I don't need them anymore. Sorry.

I have one place to store everything while I'm home or on the road. Plus, now that everything syncs with one PC, my Treo is my backup for calendar and contacts. I don't need to store them on the internet. I have everything on my lap or my palm (hmmm - maybe I should re-write that ;-)

Obviously, if you can't combine work and personal use on one platform there is still utilities to having web-based platforms. However, now that I have everything on practically one device, this power user is returning to the mother-ship. I still love you Google, but until the day arrives when you don't need serious hardware to access the internet, I'll stick with Microsoft.

This has been bothering me for a little while; actually it goes back to about 2 weeks before the 2006 elections when a liberal blogger called for a Google bombing of certain Republican candidate's natural search results. Basically the strategy went like this: identify candidates to attack, decide which negative article to link to, and then have an army of blogger drones link to the article in a post. That's a Google Bomb. Of course, there was responses that I won't write about and based on my own browsing of the results, some of the Bombing was very successful while others, not so successful. It wasn't for lack of trying, but some results are so large and top listings so entrenched that it is difficult to impact without a lot of time. Google Bombing is the first thing that bugs me

Next up, about a week ago another liberal blogger noticed that certain political ads were running on their site due to a Google PPC campaign running in their ad sense placements. Of course they were upset and explained to their readers how it works, but went a step too far when they described a money making scheme using the ads that would kill three birds with one click - get site owner money, take money from advertiser, and stick it to a candidate they didn't endorse. Telling someone to click on Google PPC is the second thing that bugs me.

Why is this bothersome? Well, it doesn't look to me like Google cares enough to throw the gauntlet down hard on folks like this. Google Bombing and letting people think that they can cash in on a big advertiser with fraudulent clicks impacts their brand in a big way. It continually reinforces that as Google gets bigger and bigger that they become less efficient and can easily be manipulated right under their noses. This happens to all companies when they start to grow and look ways to tap into new markets. However, Google owes it to its investors, users, and searches to protect their main product which the last time I look still brought in 99% of their revenue.

I wish Google would slow down the ever expanding list of products which right now hardly anyone uses and instead put renewed zeal on defending their brand. If people think they can manipulate your results, then stop them because if they perceive they can then you will scare off advertisers based on whatever reality shows up.

For Google Bombing come out and say you have a new process for protecting the results and it is against your policy. Try revising this sadly outdated post on your Google Bombing Policy because it was cute then, but now you are big business. How about hand selecting the results for the next 8 weeks or so until the bombing is over. Freeze the results where they are. Or, if someone writes how you can earn money via AdSense and hurt the competition, shut their AdSense account off forever. Slam them. Slam them hard.

If you want advertisers to spend money with you by shifting offline dollars online, than stop people from harming your product and manipulating your brand. It sure would make agency's and client's lives easier if they didn't have to explain huge Google ad dollars that can easily be manipulated.

I saw this post from LeeAnn Prescott from Hitwise called Google Blog Search Surpasses Technorati and I thought well, that's nice but not very relevant at least not based on my experience. What was most interesting was that Blogger is slip sliding away, but that was it. I filed the post in my mind as interesting, but not relevant. Nothing against Hitwise, but what my experience shows is to optimize posts for organic search on good old Google.com and not worry about blog search. Maybe that explains why the site isn't more popular but as I've written before I focus on content, not traffic. I use Technorati for tagging because, well tags are awesome ways of directing people to your site and I don't want to ignore the blogosphere. Anyway, I thought this was dead until I got this email in my junk mail folder:

Hi Eric,

The
recent data suggesting that Google Blog Search had surpassed Technorati
received a lot of hype, so we took a look at our data to see if it
showed the same results. We found that Technorati continues to hold a
significant lead over Google Blog Search in terms of unique visitors
and have a post about the findings on the Compete.com blog today.
Please check out the post to see the numbers. We would be happy if you
want to link to or write about our post, but either way we thought this
would be an interesting read for you.

So it seems the Technorati folks by way of Compete are fighting back on the data. Only difference is that I have as much interest in this fight as watching the battle between two Olympic basketball teams going at each other for the bronze medal. Blog specific search is great when you just want to focus on what is being said on blogs only, but if the blogosphere continues to grow, won't the end game be just plain search. If you have a good blog and write your posts, it will show up in regular search and opens you up to more audience. Seriously, the #1 source I have for traffic is Google.com and so it should be for you. Technorati versus Google Blog Search is like the band that was playing in the parking lot at Giants Stadium during Springsteen's Rising Tour shows in 2003. Great if you are near the lot, but me , I was just there for the Boss.

I saw this article in Thursday's Wall Street Journal called Google Tests New Ad Offerings - but Will Advertisers Follow (sorry no link today; my online subscription expired and I need a special renewal code) and it reminded me of Danny Sullivan's keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies. The keynote is almost 50 minutes long and it is fairly interesting so if you can spare the time while multi-tasking it makes for a great listen.

The three key points that resonated with me during his keynote were (and I'm paraphrasing):

Pre-roll videos ads are not the same as search marketing; search you are actively looking for something and the search engines try and bring you an ad to match your query while a pre-roll video ad prevents you from seeing what you came to the website to view. Seems obvious, but important to remember.

Google doesn't break out AdWords revenue from other sources of revenue. Check this link out to their recent quarterly filing. It shows revenue for Google Websites and Google Network Websites. What this does is let them report revenue growth and the unaware people assume it is PPC (AdWords) when it could be anything.

Google Radio, Print, TV, banners, videos, and etc are not the same as Google PPC ads. Google PPC brings you search ads based on an ongoing auction-CTR prioritization and then Google generates revenue when someone clicks on the ad. All the other versions of Google's new ad offerings are simpler ad models served via an auction style. One is performance based marketing using an auction system while the other is brand marketing using an auction system.

Point #3 brings us back to the WSJ article. It describes how Google wants to bring print, radio, TV, etc to the masses and this interesting quote from Eric Schmidt that says "The long-term fantasy is we walk up to you and you give us say $10 million and we'll completely allocate it for you" which looks like a fantasy today. What makes Google work today is that search is a) completely measurable b) auction driven c) very simple to run and d) you pay for what you use.

Google's Print and Radio products are a) auction driven and b) hopefully simple to use. What? What do you mean it isn't trackable? I thought the article mentioned Google Trends. Well you could use it but this is what you'd see today if you were say exploring a run for president and only relied on Google Trends for measurement. What's the first thing missing? Numbers and the last time I reported results of an advertising campaign (which was yesterday) they were a critical component in the analysis. How are you supposed to show results, correlation, trends without umm numbers? I guess if you had real access to Google numbers that maybe it would work, but you'd still be estimating.

I was asked last week what I thought of Google Radio and after reading today's article and going back over my notes from Danny Sullivan's keynote, I can boil it down to this - you want to purchase radio in an auction style, easy to use process than I'm sure it is fine, it may be great, and I'll probably use it. However, if you think because the product you are using is called Google Print or Google Radio that it will perform the same way as AdWords or even be measured like AdWords, then you really aren't reading the fine print and have just bought ino all the fantasy hype.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

***********UPDATE THIS AFTERNOON************

My blogger friend Bill Tancer provided some data on Google Finance which pretty much backs up my conclusion. Hitwise data shows that Google Finance is 16th overall in their Business and Finance category even after their redesign. One of the reasons Bill gives is the traffic distribution. Please see Bill's post called Google Finance - After the Redesign.

I love Google. I called them the day they turned on their PPC product and have been advertising with them ever since. Every single online advertising plan that I've developed since that day includes Google Search because it performs. I also love Yahoo and especially Yahoo Finance. It is still the premier spot on the internet today for reaching people and professionals in the finance category (Yes as part of my own company Eric Frenchman LLC, I still buy a lot in the finance category).

Anyway, I saw this announcement on the revised Google Finance page with accompanying YouTube video release and I really think they should just forget about it. Google Finance is just not relevant and according to Hitwise there is very little traffic as compared to the rest of Google's products; the number is 0.07% of Google's traffic. If it wasn't for the release and subsequent pickup in the blogosphere I wouldn't have known about it. Why? Doesn't even come to mind.

The category leaders like Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, Street.com, Motley Fool have their niches and reasons for visiting them. Organizing quotes, news, and charts has been around forever and just because you slap an Ajax interface on it doesn't change what you get which is trends, patterns, and news. The video release lists these 4 items on a blackboard as key updates:

Better Home Page - Hate to say it but I prefer Yahoo's Finance page because I get a less cluttered one, key statistics, videos, and quotes. Google's homepage has way too much information that an average investor would find as overkill.

Up to 40 years of Data - Again that's just great but what does an average investor do with that? That type of information is for professionals or quant jocks. See this screen shot for AT&T's chart set at maximum. What are you going to do with that (please no professional or quant jocks need answer that).

Improved portfolios - Nice, but umm, they have been out there forever

Importing portfolios - Umm, I wouldn't point out that you didn't have that in the first place

The biggest issue is who is the target segment for this? The average investor, professionals, stat junkies, all of the above? I can't figure it out. If you want to bring finance to the masses and democratize the data, I'd like to see a simpler approach with more organized news, video, professional commentary, and even research. Heck, even though I got into a big debate over BloggingStocks.com I think they at least tried to have a different approach of bringing a different set of datapoints to the party.

Back when Google Finance launched in March I gave a luke-warn review and I still see it that way. It has some nice Ajax functions, but at the end of the day I think Google will eventually shut this down because there just won't be enough traffic or advertising dollars to support this. At the end of the video, the product engineer says "they will do a better job of helping you find and organize your financial information". I agree that Google works best when they organize data that is unorganized, unfortunately for them, this data has been well organized for years and no amount of Ajax can change that. On a side note, I do agree with fellow MarketingProfs blogger B.L. Ochman that using YouTube to issue a press release is a brilliant idea.

I saw these two articles today on some expert's forecasts for advertising spending and maybe I'm the only one a little upset over one of the sets of numbers, but I am shocked over what I read. At AdAge the article Advertisers Expect Modest Growth for 2007 was where I first read this about Universal McCann's Robert Coen, senior VP-director of forecasting's online numbers. It seems that Mr. Coen does not include search numbers in his online forecasts. Coen predicts (maybe guesses) that online will grow by 15% without search. Here's what AdAge reported:

....has become a topic of debate, as seen by Mr. Coen's decision to leave internet search spending out of his numbers and Mr. King's decision to leave it in

Ok, I don't think I can type words that describe how myopic that is, but then I read this follow up article via the New York Times called Troubling '07 Forecast for the Old-Line Media but Not for Online where the reporter Stuart Elliot wrote that not only does Mr. Coen leave search out of his numbers "...classifying it as more promotional in nature". That's even more ridiculous. Search marketing is Advertising. I'm sure the rest of his analysis is top notch, but I wouldn't pay any attention to that. My old AT&T boss back when I was a statistical modeler and database marketing analyst used to tell me for a model: garbage in=garbage out and by ignoring the impact of search marketing on advertising is just trashy.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

BTW - all the other mediums of choice (bad choice, I mean) are forecasted to slow down while online is expected to grow...

I've been so busy as of late that I let this one slip through. A friend of mine from Google, in addition to a few folks from Connell Donatelli, sent me this link last Thursday called Google CEO Calls Net Key to Whitehouse but I never commented. So, better late than never.

First of all, of course Google is correct that the internet is key to gaining the Whitehouse in 2008. The examples that Eric Schmidt gave are the obvious ones which include postings on YouTube of Rep. Murtha and Sen. Allen, Kingdom of Bahrain having screen shots from Google Earth posted comparing lavish homes with the average person's home, and of course Google Bombing the election courtesy of some liberal bloggers. Ok, so what's a politician supposed to do with these? Simple, stop ignoring that this can happen and be proactive about using the internet.

Allocate at least 25% of advertising budgets online. Why 25%? Well on average companies today spend about 5% online and what is that going to look like by 2008?

Organize your online teams between website, advertising, and social marketing.

The social marketing person will be in charge with blogger outreach, consumer generated media, and monitoring the blogosphere

Use search marketing and display advertising to promote your message; don't just rely on what people might say, control the message just like any other medium

Build ad units that really take advantage of the medium; at a minimum stream your offline commercials in banner units (Just Stream It)

I witnessed some of these examples referenced by Schmidt. In the case of YouTube postings a simple way to combat the posts was to make sure your own messages are posted on YouTube earlier enough in the process as well as running search ads so that the YouTube postings don't appear so high in the results; you can no longer ignore 323K views of these videos. Why? Even politics is effected by the Long Tail of Marketing: reaching smaller niches of people in very cost effective methods or said another way, a few 1000 people viewing a not-so-flattering video can cost you an election.

Speaking of ignoring things, I still believe Google should do more to combat Google Bombing certain words. I firmly believe that this impacts their brand and shows that a small group of people can manipulate the results. Google Bombing the mid-term elections was really started too late to impact the vast majority of targeted campaigns, but the fact remains that people believe that they can manipulate Google's organic search results. Sure, campaigns are starting to embrace the internet, but the internet should do a little more to customize tools and reach out to the market place; ending Google Bombing would be a start in the right direction.

Is the internet key for 2008? Well it is a key component in messaging and strategy. Just like anything else in the world, a good product will sell itself, but it sure helps when marketing channels are used effectively. Stop trying to fight what's happening online by sticking with the same old ways of marketing; use the Long Tail to spread your message out more to many groups of small niches.

Wow, Yahoo finally beats Google at a product. What can only be viewed as a win for Yahoo, Google shut down Google Answers and lost out to Yahoo Answers in the new social search arena. One of the best articles/posts I saw out there was courtesy of the NY Times called Google Is Shutting Down Answers Service. Why did I think it was the best out there? Because they correctly pointed out that "Google has introduced dozens of other services, many of which have not turned into hits. The company has said that experimentation is an important part of its strategy and that a high failure rate for new products is to be expected."

I wrote about Google's product extensions back in May and pointed out that most people only use Google for search and that they were far behind Yahoo in social search. Remember, Google can make mistakes along the way when they extend out past PPC. Back in that May post it looked like other than search, Gmail was the only significantly used product. GoogleFinance? When was the last time you used that? Seriously? Bill Tancer over at Hitwise provided this chart on Yahoo Answers which shows that it is far an above the market leader.

Does it seem like I'm jumping for joy? No. I love both companies and if you've ever seen a media strategy from me I always include both because they perform. I just think people, bloggers, MSM, and analysts should give some love to Yahoo for finally beating Google at something. Is it a major battle? No and it probably helped Yahoo that Google was charging for answers But, Yahoo needs a little victory to change momentum and perception in the marketplace because they are a quality company no matter what their Peanut Butter tastes like.

Google tries a lot of different things so they don't get caught unprepared. However, that doesn't mean everything they touch will turn into GoogleGold. A little experimentation is the right strategy, but whenever Google makes an announcement these days it looks like from the reports and analysis that they will take over the world of advertising (see next post). Its like their stock can do no wrong and just keeps going up, up, up and that my friends in when you should keep a close eye on your positions - remember the go go days of internet stock in the 90s?

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

********December 1 Update************************

Bill Tancer from Hitwise updated information on which Google products people use based on the demise of Answers; I referenced his earlier analysis in a link above. In summary according to Hitwise, 88% of Google's use is plan old search, 93% is search+Gmail, and 95% is search, Gmail, and Video. All of the other product announcements launched with such fanfare like Finance, Spreadsheets, Calendar are not being used today. Product extensions and experimentation are great, but lets not start throwing dirt on category leaders like Yahoo Finance or Microsoft Office before people start visiting those pages.

John Chow let the cat out of the bag when it came to breaking the news that Google is working on a Google Display Advertising Network. John broke the news because he got invited to participate in this secret club; I wonder if it comes with secret Masonic Handshakes? The details which John shared are:

Google is creating this network to go after the big Fortune 1000 brand advertisers

They want to sell video and banner ads to these companies for high CPMs

Lucky publishers get to have a flat negotiated fee with Google for a full year and must guarantee a minimum amount impressions

About two weeks back a friend of mine asked me to poke around and see what I can find out about the double secret probation ad network. She already had some scoop on the CPMs and the length of the deal. However, what we talked about was some other motivation behind the now not-so-secret plan. With success, Google can theoretically eliminate a site's sales force. Think about it. Google represents you to these big fortune 1000 company and sells your already negotiated CPM to them on your behalf. No need to have somebody on your payroll peddling your product; just a site manager and a trafficking coordinator. No need for your account manager. So, not only do you get your CPM theoretically if you are over-sold you could eliminate some cost too. Not bad, huh? Plus, perhaps you have reduced paper work. However, isn't that a possible sales pitch for all ad networks? BTW - before you think the old man is crazy, imagine if the deals included some upfront payment for part of or all of a site's inventory? Google has deep pockets.....

I guess I'm a little skeptical. Ad networks are nothing new and the marketplace is very crowded. Besides the rare occasion when I used content networks and Google's Site Targeting, I am a huge fan of Advertising.com for their reach and ability to predict and optimize my advertising campaigns. Can Google build a better mouse trap the Advertising.com ?

The other part that makes me skeptical is my assumed interpretation of John's post is that these Fortune 1000 companies are willing to pay big CPMs in the name of simplicity and assumed targeting. And, having been one of those Fortune 1000 online advertisers on more than one occasion (ex - AT&T, Bank of Montreal) and I'm currently consulting for a few of them, it just isn't the case. Brand marketers need documented results and if they are sophisticated like my clients, it is a lot more than just running some impressions without an expected action or ROI. A number of my clients require sophisticated behavioral and/or geo-targeting while boosting brand awareness and post-click actions. Everything is getting measured.

Maybe Google is just testing here again or maybe not. They have so many balls in the air now like radio, print, mobile, spreadsheets, and now this it becomes almost difficult to keep track of everything involved and what they are becoming besides a CPC search network. I hope they don't start eating peanut butter sandwiches.

I saw this post today from Henry Blodget called Update on MSN: Still Going Nowhere Fast and it reminded me of a post I've been meaning to make. Henry makes a lot of great points, but I'd like to add a few to it (you can read the post yourself for a summary) by focusing on his comments on search and AdCenter.

I love the AdCenter platform and the only and I mean the only issue I have with it is the lack of traffic which is a pretty important attribute to have when conducting search engine marketing. I checked out one of our clients keywords and since most of our Connell Donatelli clients are politicians it was very easy to compare between the three platforms Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Basically what I found and then checked this across the board is the MSN has about 10% of Yahoo's search traffic; that's not 10% of Google, but Yahoo, and very rarely do we max out our daily budget (BTW - Yahoo is about 40%-50% of Google). Searchers don't use MSN at an acceptable level for marketers. Which gets back to another point that Henry made which is just want the Google is going on with MSN?

Are the search results inferior at MSN? Well, probably not since I'm talking about PPC advertising and as I said above I love the platform because it makes it easy to figure out what is working and how you handle the match process. My thought is that they need to work the demand side of the search instead of paying money for full page ads in the Wall Street Journal targeting the media buyers. Sophisticated advertisers know they can use the platform for marketing, the problem they will find is a lack of traffic. I haven't seen anything out of MSN that leads me to believe that they are marketing their platform to users. Sure, there is the new Internet Explorer and Vista on the way but why would you think that is going to change user behavior? A focus solely on driving search traffic should be the only search advertising MSN does these days.

Sexy platform? Absolutely. Great charts and search tools? Yes. Traffic to use those tools on? Priceless if they had them.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

********UPDATE*************

Of course I forgot about Ms Dewey which is MSN's sexy viral version of their search platform. Obviously they are trying to use this to boost traffic especially with the male demographic (type in David Wright or leave the screen up to see what she does and shows off), however, I still think they need to do more than Ms.Dewey unless this is more than just a cheap (one) trick pony. She is fun and cute, but not sure it will shift behavior from Google.

Part 1 of my week long look at my first time through a real election cycle. I originally was going to make the first post on what it is like to work in politics, but I was pre-empted by this political search study from the Rimm-Kaufman Group and I wanted to comment on it before a lot of people read it.

In general the biggest issue I had with the study is how they based their conclusions on a certain number of races, thereby introducing a selection bias into their results and that they also had no visibility into the actual spend per day. This led to the following conclusions that based on my experience in this election cycle I don't agree with:

Few political advertisers use Yahoo or as they wrote in the details "we found virtually no political ads on Yahoo"- Wrong. All of our clients used Yahoo and most used MSN.

Name-only search perspective - Wrong. They listed words which they thought we should have been buying but these words were either tested and removed or we used other better performing words.

Limited tracking - Wrong. All of the clients used tracking as provided by the search engines and then our back-end captured the donation amounts and clicks. Current clients are being moved into a bid manager platform as we speak.

Focusing on a few races without regard to daily spends generated this conclusion "We believe political pay-per-click advertising is in its infancy. We base this opinion on the low utilization, limited tracking, Google-only perspective, and name-only search emphasis." You see, we were very sophisticated for the amount of dollars that was allocated to search. Limited budgets caused certain strategies. For example, if you had $1 per day to spend where are you going to put that $1? On Google only or split it up?

Enough complaining about the study, which I did take a little too personally. It did make some good observations about the text ads and looked at differences between Republicans and Democrats. However, I do agree that search marketing is going to explode (in a good way) leading up to 2008. So, to end this wrap-up...

Eric's Top Political Search Observations

Campaigns all have different experiences with SEM, but all of them can benefit by spending $1000s per month.

Republicans seem to have embraced more search marketing than Democrats with the Dems relying on blogs/SEO for search

A well rounded campaign includes Google, Yahoo, and MSN

Content targeting should be turned off for the vast majority of campaigns and especially for ones that are not spending a decent daily amount; however, it should be tested because there are a few campaigns that had successful content campaigns.

Issues words convert differently for each campaign

Need to know what the goals of the search campaign are: donations, traffic, email sign-ups, links to video, or branding. Each one of those strategies have completely different tactics.

Monitor reported click fraud (fraud observed by Google but not charged) because if it is too high it may indicate a problem; there are plenty of zealots willing to bang your PPC ad and cause it to turn off when it hits a budget.

Yahoo and MSN need to do a better job of marketing to the political industry

Know when to geo-target and when not too or as I call it the Ryan Corollary

And finally, political advertising is not like eCommerce or traditional advertising. The product is constantly changing and different issues impact the strategy.

That's a wrap on search or at least until Connell Donatelli publishes some papers. It really is going to explode leading up to 2008 especially with the people that we worked with this year that experienced what a well managed search strategy can do for traffic, donations, and branding objectives. BTW - if you need some help drop me a line...

Yes it is true. I am not a lover of print advertising. Never have been and probably never will be at least not in its current form. Advertising in your local newspaper if you are the town deli is fine, but for national advertisers I have never seen any benefit - no increases in long distance winbacks, brokerage accounts or visits to a website as a result of a newspaper campaign. In fact, when I had meetings I'd often get tossed out early for being too vocal about wasting valuable marketing dollars in newspapers. That's why I found this NY Times article called Newspapers to Test Selling Ads On Google so perplexing.

The first thing that is perplexing is the title which is contradicted by the first sentence that says "In a move into the old-fashioned business of ink on paper, Google is going to start selling advertisements that will appear in the print editions of 50 major newspapers." I guess the title writer was confused too.

Anyway, the article describes how the 100 advertisers in the test will be able to check a box and then place bids to have an ad potentially appear in a newspaper provided the bid is accepted by the newspaper. Judging from the article, it looks like it will work like Site Targeting does today in Google (see continuation of article below). Google won't take any revenue during the test, but expects to take 20% later on. Finally, according to Owen Youngman “Google says they can bring us thousands of small advertisers for space we would otherwise fill with house ads, and we say ‘Great.'"

Seems like the newspaper industry read The Long Tail, which is a good idea. Catering to small business advertisers that wouldn't see the light of day with a newspaper for the amount of money they would spend is helpful and could generate more revenue for newspapers. So, if that's something an advertiser wants, now Google will make it available and give access to some of the largest newspapers in the country. However, the current form as described in the NY Times article won't amount to much in my opinion. Sure, this Long Tail implementation makes sense, but it deviates from much of what makes advertising with Google so great.

You see even with paying for Site Targeting on a CPM basis still works in the Google AdWords model because you can track clicks and conversions of those ads. In the newspaper test, I can't see how the results are going to be measured. Are the advertisers going to use Google Trends to measure buzz or visits to a website? If they experience anything like I have, there will be no measurable impact on any critical business key performance variable. Literally, if you want to give newspapers a try this new process gives you access previously only available to the big girls.

According to the article "Neither Google nor the newspapers would make any predictions of how much advertising would be sold in the program nor what the rates would be. “I have no idea how big this will be,” said Ms. Denise Warren. “For us, we think there is very little to lose in the test.” No there isn't much risk for newspapers or Google by putting this in place to get access to the small business Long Tail advertiser. However, unless there is some new tracking measurement in place, these small business advertisers will discover what I have with print advertising - no impact, proving everything Google is not gold.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

****UPDATE ON 11/6*****************

Couple of other articles (see afternoon link post) for Google's newspaper ad trial. I read through all of them and Googled (note proper use of the word Google :-) for past articles and I can't find any concrete plans or screen shots for how the test users are going to evaluate the results of the print trial. My guess is that it will be a combination of Google Trends/Analytics and using a unique URL for tracking the traffic. Nothing new about this tracking. If someone knows for sure, please let me know in the comments below.

About a week back I wrote a post called When Does MSN Get Upset with YouTube and it was about finding MSNBC content on YouTube. My little theory went like this: Why should a website like MSN or Disney with their own significant web traffic allow YouTube to host their own copyrighted material and make advertising revenue off of the YouTube traffic?

Well, it looks like someone over at Comedy Central read my post (probably not, but I can dream right?) and sent a request to Google-YouTube asking them to remove all copyrighted material including SouthPark, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. The material can be found over at Comedy Central's Motherload site but a quick browse through the site shows that it is not the same as the YouTube interface or other video sharing sites. However, there is a nice ad placement in the right that you must watch before the video launches. (BTW - I watched a SouthPark video of the boys playing World of Warcraft.) So my question is why should content owners let YouTube get their traffic and Google monetize it to get revenue? Obviously, Google is/was worried about that answer too.

On the heels of this announcement, comes a post from Mark Cuban called Some intimate details on the Google YouTube deal in which he gets some potential behind the scene details on the deal. As Mark says "I cant say this has been fact checked. It hasnt. I cant say its 100 pct accurate, I dont know. But it rings true, and as I said, I trust the source" but the potential behind the scenes look has some interesting points if they are true. The post is long, but here are the highlights:

YouTube offered the media companies a straight revenue deal if the copyright issues went away. It didn't fly with them.

As part of the Google deal, $500 million of the $1.65 billion purchase price was to be set aside for potential settlements. However, Google was still worried.

The media companies negotiated a most favored nation clause with YouTube so they each got $50 million; however, they didn't want to pay talent fees so opted for equity positions.

Google needed two other key points - a 6 month pause on copyright lawsuits from the media companies in the deal and lawsuits on YouTube competitors like Bolt and Grouper.

The key to a lot of what Mark wrote about is that we, Google, and anyone else involved in the video space knows is that the real money will be made on content professionally produced. That's why the traffic is being generated on these sites.

That's not to say that often a consumer generated video won't be a homerun, because it will happen. However, if you are an advertiser you'll need to know where your ads are appearing, especially if you are spending serious money - like they do with TV spending today.

Companies still spend big bucks on TV shows- if you are an advertiser where would you want your money spent? Monday Night Football or a video of a 3 year old throwing his first pass? For every great Mentos ad there is another homegrown video that will be hard to monetize. This battle is far from over. Just follow the content to see who wins.

This is priceless. Obviously with the army of lawyers Google now employs, someone convinced the marketing department to put this post up on the Official Google Blog explaining what is or is not a good use of the word Google. Basically, as long as you search on Google.com or use it to describe the company, you are in fine shape. So for example:

BAD USES OF GOOGLE:

Googling for my golf ball in the woods at Spooky Brook

I googled for a missing sock in the washer

Honey, have you googled my keys?

I'm googling for love in the wrong places...

A John Ford movie starring John Wayne called The Googlers

Standing at the urinal googling for it...

Googling in your closet for something to wear

"Google up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane

My friend K. Harper Googling for famous people whenever she travels to NYC from Toronto

Googles the ketchup (inside family joke how the husband can never find anything in the fridge)

Of course any from 1-4 above would be a proper use if they were conducted on Google.com. In fact, Google might be the only way to find that missing sock in the washer machine, which I'm sure Google has plans to index next.

I'm probably going to get nailed from both sides of the political spectrum for this post, but I like my Google results to be as pure as possible. Over the weekend a left-wing liberal blogger, you know the kind the helped Ned Lamont beat Joe Lieberman in the CT Senate Primary, posted his strategy for Google Bombing search results of Republican candidates and then combining it with a Google AdWords campaign. The plan is to have people link to negative articles about these Republican candidates so that these articles appeared #1 in the natural search results. Not to be outdone, some right-wing conservative bloggers decided to fight fire with fire and try the exact same tactics but on the Democratic opponents.

Unfortunately search children, Google doesn't work like that anymore with 15 days or so left in the election. You don't have enough time and linking is not the sole strategy in an SEO campaign for having your page rank so high. There are techniques to combat this which do NOT include trying to alter the natural results, but of course, I can not divulge them because we have already implemented them for clients long before the call to Google Bomb came out.

The most famous example of course is the Google search results for miserable failure. President George W. Bush is the #1 result followed by President Jimmy Carter, but besides that, what is interesting is that the top sponsored search is from Google for explaining these results and the #3 position is from a SEO company for optimization techniques (nice placement). Google's explanation includes calling these people pranksters, that they are reluctant to alter results like this, and they don't believe it alters the overall quality, whose objectivity remains their core mission.

That explanation from Google seems pretty decent when they were a small cute company, but not any more. The results that they deliver on search should be as pure as possible and when a group of thugs, not pranksters, wants to hold my search results hostage for their own political gains that alters Google objectivity. Sure maybe a few examples Google doesn't mind, but what happens if 1000's of people get together and decided to alter results on every political candidate? Shouldn't Google pay attention then? Isn't this their product and shouldn't they try to protect their brand? If people think they can alter results and game the system, then why would advertisers want to pay for altered results?

It seems to me that when people get together and bomb Google's results, that they are doing more than just pushing their own views on people. They are damaging Google's brand and reputation and that demands a response from Google. If nothing else, this is the worst form of link baiting* and the architects of the Google Bombing effort for the 2006 mid-term election deserve link baiting punishment. I want my Google results clean and objective and so should Google.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

* BTW if you are keeping score at home, Google Bombing and Link Baiting are not exactly the same tactic, but both are a result of a linking strategy.

*********UPDATE ON 10/26****************************

An article from The National Journal called Political bloggers coordinate "Google Bombs" has a great quote from Mike Connell on the likely ineffective use of Google bombing the election and Google backs him up too. It also includes a quote from Pete Leyden director of Democratic think tank New Politics Institute who says "it will definitely work. So few people are buying political search ads [that] a blogger can get it for literally pennies per eyeball." Umm, I'm one of those people and I know pretty much every CPC out there. Clearly, thinking about search marketing at New Politics Institute is not a pre-requisite for getting a job there. Let me be blunt, they have no idea what they are doing when it comes to search engine marketing.

The other day I watched a few videos online. First, I started off over at MSNBC watching Chris Matthew's Hardball's College Tour and then for some odd reason, I ended up following a few links to a YouTube video with MSNBC's Keith Obermann. Of course both units had advertising on the margins with YouTube's primary advertising revenue source being Google PPC Content Targeting ads. Besides the obvious copyright battles, what about the ad revenue battle between Google PPC Content Text ads versus MSN's ad targeting system.

MSNBC historically has high CPM rates for display ads especially ones framing video ads. Believe me, I ought to know because I've been buying on MSN for years. Their traffic is being diverted to YouTube-Google when people upload this co pyrighted material so instead of watching it on MSNBC you can see it on YouTube. The revenue generated from this should be lower (not a scientific analysis but just based on my experience in running content CPCs versus buying display ads). In effect, MSN is losing traffic and revenue when these files are uploaded. I can't believe they will continue to allow this which not only becomes a battle over copyrighted material but also a battle in ad revenue models. Even if they had a deal, they'd have to make it up on tremendous amounts of clicks.

So, where do you think the battle is going to end up? If you are a major publisher like MSN or Disney and have tremendous amounts of traffic already, I can't believe you are going to sit on the sidelines and let YouTube take your traffic away with your own protected media. How much pay per click advertising from clueless advertisers using Google's content targeting would need to go to MSN or Disney to allow this to occur? I'd think the derived CPMs wouldn't match up for a while. And, if they don't send orders to YouTube to remove it, I hope they don't go after the consumers that posted it as my fellow Marketing Prof Mack Collier warns in his post called The Google-YouTube Deal: Here's What You Missed. It should be an interesting fight....I wonder who gets to copyright it and post it on YouTube.

Sure there has been a ton of posts on Google and YouTube, so I'm not going to waste your time with my opinion on the deal. You want a good perspective on the subject, than give Mark Cuban a read on his last post on the deal called I Still Think Google is Crazy. When you read Mark's post and others on the deal one thing that is constant is what will Google do about copyright infringement? Let's put aside the consumer generated content aspect of YouTube because the benefits are obvious: traffic, free hosting, support of the community, chance to get voted up to the top for fame and fortune, and possibly advertising revenue. I said possibly because not all marketers will want their brand message next to an unknown video, but that subject has been beaten like a dead horse.

My question is why would someone like Disney want to embrace YouTube for hosting their content? According to Nielsen, Disney is the ninth largest parent company on the internet for August 2006 with over 40 million uniques and an average time per person of 40 minutes. YouTube is a few notches down with 34 million uniques and an average time spent of 29 minutes. Clearly Disney has an audience and an even younger one and I'm sure if they wanted to, can build a social community around their content; think Walt Disney World with videos. The brand value is fantastic, they already have an audience, and they have content so why should they share their advertising revenue? Disney could also participate in CGC on their own sites or use YouTube as a portal to drive traffic much the same way TheStreet.com uses Yahoo to push traffic and usage their way.

NBC's Beth Comstock has interesting observations on consumer generated content and has a deal in place with YouTube that allows YouTube's audience to enhance NBC's fall line-up backed up with cross promotion deals between the two. At her OMMA keynote she describes how the content king has been overthrown and that consumer generated media should be described as "small media"; plus big media companies should get used to giving up control. However, when pressed by ZDNet's Donna Bogatin on the NBC YouTube deal she said that it was a promotional one with no money exchanging hands. However, whoever does the best job of monetizing the content of this deal is the one that controls it and YouTube just added Google into its corner.

Rounding out the big 3 networks, Yahoo is going to carry local news footage from CBS Television Stations, stressing once again that it is not just the content, but also the ability to distribute the content to people that are searching for it.

What gives? I think "big media" where content is king, still hasn't figured out where the long term play is going. Sure they understand the power of CGC but who owns the big media content, how much revenue can they extract from a deal, and where does the traffic come from are still unknowns in the long term. Google is betting that YouTube can be a portal that brings big and small media together with the community and then monetizes the traffic powered by Google technology.

Me? I think you just need to follow the content owners. The ones with a critical mass audience and content are not going to give it up so easily. Heck, they are already starting to grumble over their rights. If I'm NBC or Disney, I'm only doing trials for forecasting future revenue models with no long term commitments, testing impacts of the community and CGC, examining ways to build my own community, and then defending my content because while it may no longer be king, it is the only real play I have.

In today's iMedia Connection there is an article (if that's what you'd call it) written by Brian Easter, Nebo Web's CEO, titled Major Politicians Missing from Google; however what really is missing is Brian's use of Google to actually find politicians using search engine marketing. Brian's article reports:

"very noticeably, there is a lack of major politicians in the search engine results for keywords that people search on. (Each campaign is unique so their words are unique)

So, if you were a politician like Hillary ...or John..., you would probably want your site to be ranked for a whole host of terms like "national security," "Iraq war," "War on terror," and many more. (They are there for words that are important to the individual campaign)

It seems incredible that major politicians are not putting out their messages on their key positions through the search engines. (It is incredible that you didn't find them)

If someone is motivated enough to type in a search on immigration reform, then, I as a political candidate, would want you to read my position on this issue on my website.(See screen shot below)

First off, it means our politicians are not web-savvy when is comes to marketing". (Believe me, they get search engine marketing)

Wow, if you actually read this article you'd think that politicians are ignoring search engine marketing. "Incredible" he wrote; it is incredible that a CEO of a company that supposedly delivers results and lists search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising as a skill set, couldn't find the political PPC advertising. For example, instead of just blindly writing point #4 above, he could have actually typed in immigration reform into Google and he would have seen a political advertiser as shown in the image above.

I won't give away our search strategy for political advertisers, but let's just say that we and our clients are more sophisticated than what Brian reports. As any private marketer knows, it depends on what the goals are and how much budget you have to spend when it comes to designing a well managed search campaign. We construct individual search campaigns for each of our clients based on their budget and objectives; some campaigns are as complex as any private sector advertiser but everyone is unique.

Political advertising is not as simple and certainly not as clueless as Brian writes about. Each one has different goals and challenges and what works for one campaign (ex, immigration reform) may not work for others. A simple search via Google would have turned up PPC advertisers and not just the ones we are working with. Heck, he could have found this website or an article in ClickZ today that mentions yours truly talking about among other topics, political search marketing.

When choosing an agency to handle your search engine marketing, make sure you choose one that actually knows how to use search. Having a skill that you pay an agency for is usually an important component of the relationship. And, when it comes to political advertising, having the right relationship is key to getting out the right message in a cost effective manner.

I just finished reading this week's featured BusinessWeek article Click Fraud, the dark side of advertising and it comes up a little short in providing marketers with a full picture. Sure it does a good job of diving into the business of click fraud and highlights David and Renee Struck's time engaging in it. It even showcases Martin Fleischmann from Mostchoice.com as an expert in search strategy with all of his spreadsheets. Unfortunately these expert advertisers are diving into content targeting where anyone with real experience knows it is hard to make work because of the lack of visibility into the sites it is running on and the fact it is not really the PPC advertising which made Google such a star. You see, content targeting is a part of Google/Yahoo which you opt-in to have your text ads shown on sites that are part of Google/Yahoo's extended network (see Google ads on left margin).

What got me so fired up with the article is this paragraph: "Fleischmann, like most other advertisers, has agreed to let Google and Yahoo recycle his ads on affiliated sites. The search engines describe these affiliates in glowing terms. A Google help page entitled Where will my ads appear? mentions such brand names as AOL.com and the Web site of he New York Times. Left unmentioned are the parked Web sites filled exclusively with ads and sometimes associated with click-fraud rings. "

Well left unmentioned in the article is how easy it is to opt-out of participating in it, how you can set different bid amounts, and if you want, hand select sites for your ads to appear on. Anyone with any limited experience knows that content is an area that you need to watch closely. Almost all of the search campaigns that I have ever run either have content turned off altogether or set to a very low CPC amount. The so called experts like Fleischmann should never have had it on to start with or at least should have shut it off long ago. See the picture on the right to understand how easy it is to turn it off or set different bid amounts. Just a check off box, but this was left out of the article. Now you have more expertise than the Fleischmanns of the world without his pile of spreadsheets!!!

What annoys me the most about content (besides the fraud) is the lack of visibility which Yahoo and Google refuse to give advertisers when they want to advertise in these networks. Unless you have a bid manager, you have no idea where your ads run. The only thing you can do is opt-in using Google's site targeting and hand pick sites, but for that honor you get to run your ads on a CPM basis. Here's a screen shot which BusinessWeek neglected to include.

The primary reason advertisers go to Google and Yahoo is for the targeted cost per click advertising found on Google and Yahoo.com search results. Not from the complicated, fraud intense content networks that BusinessWeek focused on and in my opinion didn't do enough to point out the differences between Google.com and these sites.

If you really must advertise in content follow the tips found in the continuation of this post. Otherwise just turn it off and watch your results on Google.com and Yahoo.com. Sure there might be what BusinessWeek calls Version 1.0 fraud (competitors clicking on your ads) but Google and Yahoo do a good job of filtering that out. BusinessWeek forgot to tell you that, but then again they probably would have sold less magazines with a less than eye-catching title.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

********UPDATE TO MY ORIGINAL POST********************************

I've received a few comments plus trackbacks to this post and I'd like to provide a little more information on it, And, yes I do know a little something about content targeting. I've been off and on content for both Yahoo and Google for years and it has mostly been off.

GOOGLE - Within Google you can select to opt-in to Google.com, network search results (ex - searches conducted on MySpace and others), content (text ads appearing on pages in the sites in their network), and site targeting (CPM buys on sites so that your image ads appear on those pages). So, if fraud is really your issue keep your ad buys to Google.com only.

Yahoo - Yahoo is a little more difficult because even if you opt-out of content match you still end up in Yahoo's network for search results. Basically, Yahoo Sponsored Search is similar to having Google.com+Network Search results.

Personally, I don't have any issues with having ads shown as the results of a search on Google or somewhere else within the network. It really is a matter of return on investment and getting your results in line. I still believe that Business Week could have done more to educate (and they've done this before in articles of this size) advertisers on how to protect themselves, but they chose not to. Instead, you have an article that positions search marketing as a dangerous place because of fraud and really only Yahoo and Google benefit. If that was the case, then what about all of the campaigns that I've run that have delivered excellent cost per actions? Are they all a result of fraud? No.

Eric

********9-28-06 UPDATE*************

Michael Andrew from MostChoice.com comments on my post and provides more clarification on what their search strategy is. Thanks Michael.

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